I must admit to being a bit skeptical when I set out to review Internet Research Scout. I'm a person who is set in my ways when it comes to doing internet research. Sometimes it seems like there are so many new programs out there, that it becomes really confusing. Inertia sets in, and you want to just stick with your old ways -- even though you know there must be a better way to do it.

That's the way I felt about internet research. I used notepad (or more precisely a great freeware version of notepad that I downloaded from the internet some time ago called metapad). But on some websites I couldn't capture the text. I would try going to "view source" but then I'd get messy HTML that I had to convert. Sometimes, it was completely unusable.

Then I discovered a neat feature with Internet Research Scout that I really like. Capture the data, using the Capture button in Internet Explorer. This brings up Internet Research Scout. Now choose Special from the menu, and you see an option to convert everything to plain text! There are other options, like converting it to CSS styles. Internet Research Scout lets you edit the CSS styles too. This is fantastic for capturing data that you want to rewrite and use on your own website.

It's the information age, and more and more our livelihoods revolve around rapidly changing information from around the world. Internet business compete globally, and often need to use data from other sources in advertising copy or for other purposes.

Internet Research Scout makes it easier to get the data you need and transform it into what you want. I believe that students, academics, copy writers, and anyone who does internet research will be pleased with this software.
The learning curve is not bad, but it did take me a day or two to acclimate myself to the various options.

I'll give you an example of how the program helped me. Our entertainment division (Pharos Games) is now producing Hubble Space posters, and competing with other companies who are offering the same products. We found that there was a great deal of interest in the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, and that our price was the very competitive. But our advertising was pretty poor, and it was difficult to find. I went to the Hubble website, and tried to capture the data using the usual cut and paste method. However, due to the website design, it didn't work. Then I remembered Internet Research Scout. I captured the data and quickly converted it to plain text.

I also found out that I could generate a bibliogaphy from my research project using Internet Research Scout with the click of a button. This is fantastic! I personally write a lot of reviews and other articles for website content, and Internet Research Scout is going to make my work much better and faster. This is a great tool that I highly recommend.

One other thing I found out - Internet Research Scout will generate PDFs! Often the PDF format is required due to certain publishing restrictions. PDF is the preferred format for posting documents on the Internet, because of the worry about viruses in other popular formats. I recently purchased software just to get this capability, and it was not nearly as easy to use as Internet Research Scout. Now you can do the PDF conversion directly from your research project.

Kudos to Bytescout for developing Internet Research Scout. It's a terrific research tool!